Unleashing the Superpowers of Executives: How Boards Can Help Us Soar

By Monika Kalra Varma, CEO, BoardSource and Jamie Allison, Executive Director, Walter & Elise Haas Fund

We are living in a time of profound change and complexity. Maintaining community safety nets, advancing justice, expanding opportunity, and centering and honoring the dignity of all is more urgent than it has been in recent history. Facing these realities, the world seems to be looking for heroes to save the day. Although cape-clad superheroes are not descending from the sky, if we look around us and within ourselves we can find our superheroes and unleash our collective superpowers to meet the moment. 

Nonprofit and philanthropic leaders have always been called to meet extraordinary challenges. Today’s leaders are serving growing needs with fewer or unpredictable resources, guiding teams and communities facing immense trauma, and developing innovative solutions to impossible challenges. They are acting with both courage and imagination, often under intense pressure and public scrutiny. The call to lead with purpose, courage, resilience, and creativity has never been louder and executive leaders are responding. 

Meeting this moment requires radical partnership. Every superhero needs allies—and in the world of governance, that ally is the board. As leaders of nonprofits, we have benefited from strong board relationships that deepen and enhance our leadership. [Jamie is a member of BoardSource’s board.] With this blog, we explore how to create the conditions for chief executives’ superpowers to flourish in service of the organization’s purpose.

1. Break Bread Together

Boards and organizations are made up of people, not positions. The first step in any strong partnership is connection. Understanding each others’ strengths, challenges, and gifts, learning about each other’s families and communities, and connecting on what brings each person into the work lays the foundation for everything that follows. “Breaking bread together” on a regular basis, in the form of actual meals, personal check-ins, and heart-centered connections among those dedicated to an organization’s mission, builds and enhances trust.

2. Activate Purpose Together

When a board and executive are aligned around purpose, they can lead with clear direction and confidence, even when the path ahead is uncertain. In times like these, when so many decisions feel impossible, we can find ourselves operating from a place of fear. It can show up as caution, conflict, or the urge to retreat. Reconnecting to purpose allows everyone to take a collective breath, remember what truly matters, and find the courage to move forward together. 

When a board feels stuck or is navigating conflict, the most constructive step is to pause and return to purpose. From this place of alignment, the board becomes a true thought partner—working in partnership with the executive to navigate difficult choices with clarity.

3. Recognize and Respect Human Capacity

Superpowers are not all-encompassing. Every leader has strengths and limits. Some are visionaries but not detail-oriented operators; others are strategic thinkers but not natural communicators. Great boards understand and accept this. They support chief executives to build their own teams and structures that complement their abilities by encouraging them to hire, for example, the “details person” who turns vision into execution. This understanding is one of the most powerful acts of governance.

4.  Create the Conditions for Power to Flourish

The most effective boards act as coaches, champions, and partners. They encourage their executives to lead with authenticity, to take smart risks, and to navigate inevitable moments of doubt. The result is not about unchecked authority, it’s activated leadership. When activated, the CEO’s superpowers—vision, empathy, decisiveness, creativity—guide the organization’s collective work. When boards create space for that kind of leadership, they unleash organizational strength that no single person can achieve alone.

5. Strengthen the Board’s Own Immune System

For a leader’s superpowers to flourish, the board itself must be strong, self-aware, and well-functioning. A healthy board culture that is grounded in trust, open communication, humility, shared commitment, and internal accountability serves as the organization’s immune system. Boards also need a strong foundation of governance structures and disciplined practices that make the work run smoothly.

As boards strengthen their own practices, they often discover their own superpowers: strategic insight, creative problem-solving, and deep collective wisdom. Investing in governance health isn’t just an act of stewardship, it’s an act of leadership. (BoardSource’s Purpose-Driven Board Leadership framework and tools can help boards strengthen these muscles, ensuring that the partnership between board and executive becomes a source of resilience.)

6. Be the Wisdom Keepers

Boards hold a unique vantage point: a 360-degree perspective that bridges history, community, and future possibility. When used well, this perspective can provide grounding and guidance without constraining innovation. By serving as wisdom keepers, boards help executives anticipate challenges and recognize opportunities that might otherwise go unseen.

Wisdom keeping is not about holding power; it’s about holding perspective with humility, curiosity, and care. When boards bring that spirit to their partnership with executives, they create space for reflection, learning, and shared vision. In doing so, they ensure that experience and foresight become tools for progress, not caution.

7. Bring Joy

Executives and their teams are working to address unthinkable needs in their communities. Primary and vicarious trauma are ever present across much of our sector. In board and committee meetings, the tone and weight of the decisions that need to be made can feel overwhelming. Board members can bring joy and levity into those spaces. It does not minimize the heaviness of the moment, it is because of it that joy is most needed. We like to bring music into our conversations and board check-ins. We play with words and themes. There are many things that are not in our control, but bringing joy into meetings very much is.

Joy is also deeply connected to sustainability. When boards make space for joy, they also affirm the humanity of their leaders, including their hopes, their weariness, and their resilience. That affirmation can reinforce well-being far beyond a single meeting. By championing organizational practices that protect rest, renewal, and recovery, such as sabbaticals, restorative breaks, or intentional pause periods, boards help sustain executive leaders for the long haul. They honor not just what leaders do, but who they are and the cost of showing up every day.

When leaders feel seen, supported, and celebrated, not just for their results but for their commitment and care, their superpowers are more likely to endure.

There may be no capes in this work, but there is courage—the courage to lead, to listen, and to believe in one another’s power. When boards and executives operate in true partnership, they reflect what our sector and the communities we partner with represent at their best: trust, humility, and shared purpose. Together, we can meet this moment with clarity and love, grounded in the belief that when leadership is shared, our organizations, and our communities, are stronger for it.